A microstrip array antenna with 45-degree inclined linear polarization is proposed for automotive radars. The proposed antenna has the advantages of high aperture efficiency, low profile and ease of manufacture. The rectangular radiating elements inclined at 45 degrees to the straight microstrip line are directly connected to it at their corners in the proposed array antenna. The radiating element has a feature that radiation conductance for co-polarization is controlled widely enough to set desired amplitude distribution keeping excited mode for cross-polarization negligibly small. The feed line loss of the linear array antenna having 15 wavelengths is estimated 0.9 dB in the design taking the loss of the microstrip line into account. The performance of two types of developed antennas, for electrical and mechanical scanning radars, is presented. The fan beam subarray antenna for electrical scanning radars has an aperture efficiency of 53% with gain of 22.5 dBi at 76.5 GHz. For mechanical scanning radars, the two-stage series feeding circuit is also proposed for lower feed line loss and setting desired amplitude distribution. The pencil beam array antenna has an aperture efficiency of 39% with gain of 32.2 dBi at 76.5 GHz.

This paper describes a practical Japanese natural language Question Answering system adopting effective selection of dynamic passages, Lexico-Semantic Patterns (LSP), and Predictive Answer Indexing. By analyzing the previous TREC QA data, we defined a dynamic passage unit and developed a passage selection method suitable for Question Answering. Using LSP, we identify the answer type of a question and detect answer candidates without any deep linguistic analyses of the texts. To guarantee a short response time, Predictive Answer Indexing is combined into our overall system architecture. As a result of the three engineering techniques, our system showed excellent performance when evaluated by mean reciprocal rank (MRR) in NTCIR-3 QAC-1.

In this paper, we present our investigation of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) on the local query regions for solving the computation restrictions of the LSI on the global information space. Through the experiments with different SVD dimensionality on the local query regions, the results show that low-dimensional LSI can achieve much better precision than VSM and similar precision to global LSI. Such small SVD factors indicate that there is an almost linear surface in the local query regions. The largest or the two largest singular vectors have the ability to capture such a linear surface and benefit the particular query. In spite of the fact that Local LSI analysis needs to perform the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) computation for each query, the surprisingly small requirements of the SVD dimension resolve the computation restrictions of LSI for large scale IR tasks. Moreover, on the condition that several relevant sample documents are available, application of low dimensional LSI for these documents can obtain comparable precision with the Local RF in a different manner.

Let us introduce n ( 2) nonlinear mappings fi (i = 1,2,,n) defined on complete linear metric spaces (Xi-1,ρ) (i = 1,2,,n), respectively, and let fi: Xi-1 Xi be completely continuous on bounded convex closed subsets Xi-1,(i = 1,2,,n 0), such that fi() . Moreover, let us introduce n fuzzy-set-valued nonlinear mappings Fi: Xi-1 Xi {a family of all non-empty closed compact fuzzy subsets of Xi}. Here, we have a fixed point theorem on the recurrent system of β-level fuzzy-set-valued mapping equations: xi Fiβ(xi-1,fi(xi-1)), (i = 1,2,,n 0), where the fuzzy set Fi is characterized by a membership function µFi(xi): Xi [0,1], and the β-level set Fiβ of the fuzzy set Fi is defined as Fiβ {ξi Xi | µFi(ξi) β}, for any constant β (0,1]. This theorem can be applied immediately to discussion for characteristics of ring nonlinear network systems disturbed by undesirable uncertain fluctuations and to fine estimation of available behaviors of those disturbed systems. In this paper, its mathematical situation and proof are discussed, in detail.

This study describes the feasibility of using the penalty-function nonlinear programming neural network method to find the optimal power generating output which minimizes both the costs of generating power and power transmission losses. This method depends on neural network technology in acquiring exterior penalty function. Employing nonlinear function in equality and inequality constraints, the model is established using a neural network and additional objective functions; these additional objective functions expand cost function by using an appropriate penalty function. In this study, a 26-busbar including six generators was used to test the penalty function nonlinear programming neural network method. A comparison with the sequential unconstrained minimization technique (SUMT) demonstrates the reliability and precision of the optimal solution obtained using the new method.

A method for a genuinely multivariate analysis of statistical phase synchronization phenomena in empirical data is presented. It is applied to EEG data from a psychological experiment, obtaining results which indicate a possible relevance of this method in the context of cognitive science as well as in other fields.

An adaptive backstepping and high order sliding modes control algorithm is proposed for output tracking of mobile robots. The controller can greatly reduce the chattering due to conventional sliding modes technique. The proposed algorithm has certain robustness with respect to the external random disturbances and good adaptability with respect to the parametric uncertainty. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is demonstrated by simulations studies.

In this paper a digital frequency domain RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) cancellation scheme for DMT (Discrete Multitone) based VDSL (Very high speed Digital Subscriber Line) systems is presented. The proposed algorithm has been optimized and characterized in terms of complexity and performance. Optimizations were also performed from an implementation point of view by deducing key dependencies among our RFI model coefficients that let us drastically reduce the size of the memories involved. System simulations showed the effectiveness of the canceller: in terms of VDSL performance parameters such as bit rate, the optimized cancellation scheme recovers almost totally the performance degradation due to RFI.

In this paper we describe the investigation of design methodology of a planar duplexer consisting of BPFs using mixed tapped resonators. Firstly, we propose the planar duplexer consisting of bandpass filters (BPFs) using a tapped open-ended λ/2 resonator and a tapped λ/4 resonator. The duplexer is designed based on the general filter theory with narrow band approximation and tap-coupling technique. The actual duplexer is fabricated using a coplanar waveguide (CPW). Secondly, downsizing of the planar duplexer is carried out based on the BPF using stepped impedance resonators (SIRs). Lastly, another type of duplexer consisting of different BPFs using mixed tapped resonators is investigated in the same manner. The results of this study lead us to the conclusion that the design methodology is useful for realizing the high-performance planar duplexer fabricated without increasing the number of elements.

It is still an open question whether software agents should be personified in the interface. In order to study the effects of faces and facial expressions in the interface, a series of experiments was conducted to compare subjects' responses to and evaluation of different faces and facial expressions. The experimental results obtained demonstrate that: 1) personified interfaces help users engage in a task, and are well suited for an entertainment domain; 2) people's impressions of a face in a task are different from ones of the face in isolation. Perceived intelligence of a face is determined not by the agent's appearance but by its competence; 3) there is a dichotomy between user groups which have opposite opinions about personification. Thus, agent-based interfaces should be flexible to support the diversity of users' preferences and the nature of tasks.

A robust adaptive filtering algorithm was established recently (I. Yamada, K. Slavakis, K. Yamada 2002) based on the interactive use of statistical noise information and the ideas developed originally for efficient algorithmic solutions to the convex feasibility problems. The algorithm is computationally efficient and robust to noise because it requires only an iterative parallel projection onto a series of closed half spaces highly expected to contain the unknown system to be identified and is free from the computational load of solving a system of linear equations. In this letter, we show the potential applicability of the adaptive algorithm to the identification problem for the second order Volterra systems. The numerical examples demonstrate that a straightforward application of the algorithm to the problem soundly realizes fast and stable convergence for highly colored excited speech like input signals in possibly noisy environments.

The existing methods for the reconstruction of a super-resolution image from a sequence of undersampled and subpixel shifted images have to solve a large ill-condition equation group by approximately finding the pseudo-inverse matrix or performing many iterations to approach the solution. The former leads to a big burden of computation, and the latter causes the artifacts or noise to be stressed. In order to solve these problems, in this paper, we consider applying pyramid structure to the super-resolution of the image sequence and present a suitable pyramid framework, called Super-Resolution Image Pyramid (SRIP). Based on the imaging process of the image sequence, the proposed method divides a big back-projection into a series of different levels of small back-projections, thereby avoiding the above problems. As an example, the Iterative Back-Projection (IBP) suggested by Peleg is included in this pyramid framework. Computer simulations and error analyses are conducted and the effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated. The image resolution can be improved better even in the case of severely undersampled images. In addition, the other general super-resolution methods can be easily included in this framework and done in parallel so as to meet the need of real-time processing.

We newly propose a stable algorithm for blind source separation (BSS) combining multistage ICA (MSICA) and linear prediction. The MSICA is the method previously proposed by the authors, in which frequency-domain ICA (FDICA) for a rough separation is followed by time-domain ICA (TDICA) to remove residual crosstalk. For temporally correlated signals, we must use TDICA with a nonholonomic constraint to avoid the decorrelation effect from the holonomic constraint. However, the stability cannot be guaranteed in the nonholonomic case. To solve the problem, the linear predictors estimated from the roughly separated signals by FDICA are inserted before the holonomic TDICA as a prewhitening processing, and the dewhitening is performed after TDICA. The stability of the proposed algorithm can be guaranteed by the holonomic constraint, and the pre/dewhitening processing prevents the decorrelation. The experiments in a reverberant room reveal that the algorithm results in higher stability and separation performance.

This paper considers a transaction-based multi-server system with rejuvenation, and derive the optimal software rejuvenation policies under some system dependability measures; the steady-state availability, the probability of transaction loss and the upper bound of mean response time on transactions. We compare the system configuration based on a single-server with that based on a multi-server in terms of the software rejuvenation scheme. In numerical examples, we calculate the optimal software rejuvenation timing and its associated dependability measure, and refer to the effect of preventive maintenance in the transaction-based multi-server software systems.

Passification of a non-square linear system is considered by using a parallel feedforward compensator (PFC) and a squaring gain matrix. In contrast to the previous result, a technical assumption is removed by modifying the structure of the PFC. As a result, the broader class of non-square systems can be made passive by the proposed design method. Using the static output feedback (SOF) algorithms, the input-dimensional PFC and the squaring matrix can be designed systematically. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by practical system examples in the control literature.

Multiple access interference and near-far effect cause the performance of the conventional single user detector in DS/CDMA systems to degrade. Due to high complexity of the optimum multiuser detector, suboptimal multiuser detectors with less complexity and reasonable performance have received considerable attention. In this paper we apply the classic and a new modified genetic algorithm for multiuser detection of DS/CDMA signals. It is shown that the classic genetic algorithm (GA) reaches an error floor at high signal to noise ratios (SNR) while the performance of proposed modified GA is much better than the classic one and is comparable to the optimum detector with much less complexity. The results hold true for AWGN and fading channels. We also describe another GA called as meta GA to find the optimum parameters of the modified GA. We compare the performance of proposed method with the other detectors used in CDMA.

In this paper, expressions are derived for the bit error rate (BER) of the multicarrier-CDMA (MC-CDMA) downlink in the presence of pure impulsive interference and a frequency-selective fading and the BER performance is numerically evaluated by a Monte-Carlo simulation method. Minimum mean square error combining (MMSEC) and orthogonal restoration combining (ORC) are considered for frequency-domain equalization. The joint weight of antenna diversity reception using maximal ratio combining (MRC) and frequency equalization combining is derived. The MC-CDMA transmission performance in the presence of pure impulsive interference is compared with that of DS-CDMA transmission.

In this paper, we propose multiple subcarrier modulation (MSM) for infrared wireless systems using punctured convolutional codes and variable amplitude block codes to minimize the average optical power by allocating the appropriate amplitudes to the puncturing bits. The proposed system maps the coded bits corresponding to zeros in the puncturing table to the amplitudes of subcarriers, while the rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) code deletes them. We compare two proposed systems with the conventional systems: one block code maps the coded bits corresponding to zeros in the puncturing table to zeros (proposed 1), and the other maps them to the appropriate values among 0, and 1 (proposed 2) so that the required bias can be minimized. We show that the proposed 2 can achieve the minimum required SNR at the same average optical power and the same information rate among all the systems.

Integration of the IP/MPLS network and the WDM optical mesh network is a promising approach to realizing an efficient backbone network. Because of the great volumes of traffic carried, the social cost incurred by a failure will be extremely high, so survivability is very important in the backbone network. In survivable IP/MPLS over WDM backbone networks, cooperation of the optical level fault recovery and the IP/MPLS level fault recovery is essential. This paper analyzes cost characteristics of the optical level fault recovery and the IP/MPLS level fault recovery. A mathematical programming method is proposed to minimize the initial network cost when the IP/MPLS level fault recovery is utilized in the survivable IP/MPLS over WDM networks. Using this method, the initial network cost needed for the IP/MPLS level fault recovery is compared with that for the optical level fault recovery. The initial network cost for the LSP (Label Switched Path) protection scheme is smaller than that for the shared light-path protection scheme and larger than that for the pre-plan type light-path restoration scheme. The LSP protection scheme is suitable for the best-effort type traffic while the shared light-path protection scheme may be suitable for the bandwidth guaranteed type traffic.

In this paper, we propose a scalable Extended Differentiated-Services (EDS) architecture to guarantee edge-to-edge explicit rate allocation. In presence of flows with explicit rate allocation, to share bandwidth fairly, a new fairness definition is proposed. Based on EDS and the proposed fairness definition, a scalable fair Edge-to-Edge Congestion Control Algorithm with Explicit Rate Allocation (ECC-ERA) is presented to solve the bandwidth assurance problem facing Differentiated Service architecture, where EDS uses congestion control packets to carry the flow-related states and congestion control information. By designing efficiency control and fairness control separately, the ECC-ERA can achieve good scalability to link capacity, round-trip time and number of flows. It will be shown that EDS plus ECC-ERA outperforms the general Diff-Serv bandwidth guarantee approaches. The main advantages of EDS+ECC-ERA are as follows: (1) it not only can guarantee explicit rate allocation, but also can guarantee near-zero packet loss in core routers, high utilization, lower and smoother queueing delay, better fairness and better protection from unresponsive traffic. (2) Neither resource pre-reservation nor sophisticated scheduling mechanisms are required. The simple FIFO at core routers is enough. (3) EDS plus EC-ERA is very efficient and can be used as end-to-end QoS building block.